The true story of Peter Mutabazi and his son Anthony — a boy nobody kept, and the man who decided he would.
Three o’clock in the morning
He arrived in blue pajamas.
It was January 2017, somewhere around three in the morning, in a quiet neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina. An eleven-year-old boy named Anthony stood on the front porch of a stranger’s house with a gray Batman blanket draped over his shoulders and a duffel bag clutched to his chest. Inside the bag: one sweater, a pair of sneakers, and not much else. A social worker stood behind him, exhausted from a night of phone calls, waiting for someone to open the door.
Anthony had been at the hospital earlier that night. His adoptive parents had driven him there, told him they were leaving him, and walked out without saying goodbye. The hospital had called child services. Child services had started calling foster homes. Most of them were full. Most of them had said no.
The man who opened the door — Peter Mutabazi — had almost said no, too.
Why Peter almost said no
Peter had just said goodbye to two foster siblings he had loved for months. He was tired. He needed a few weeks to breathe, to put himself back together, before opening his home to another child who would arrive scared and leave too soon.
When the social worker called him a few hours before Anthony showed up, Peter’s first instinct was to say he couldn’t. He had a right to. He had earned a few weeks of rest.
But somewhere between the phone ringing and his mouth opening to answer, Peter remembered being eleven.
The boy on the streets of Kampala
Peter Mutabazi grew up in a small village in Uganda. His father was abusive. When Peter was ten years old — one year younger than Anthony was on that January night — he ran away from home. He did not have a plan. He did not have a destination. He had a few cents in his pocket and a body small enough to disappear.
He ended up in Kampala. He lived on the streets for nearly five years.
He slept in doorways. He carried groceries to people’s cars in exchange for coins. When the coins did not come, he stole oranges and bananas from the shopping bags he was carrying, just enough to eat once a day. He learned how to sleep with one eye open. He learned how to be invisible. He learned, by the time he was thirteen, that no one was coming to save him.
And then, one afternoon in a marketplace, a stranger walked up to him and asked him his name.
It was the first time in years anyone had asked him that question. The man’s name was Josh Masiko. He bought Peter a meal. He came back the next week. He came back the week after that. And eventually, Mr. Masiko paid for Peter to attend boarding school.
That single question — what is your name — is the hinge on which Peter’s entire life now turns. He has said, more than once, that everything he is rests on a stranger’s undeserved kindness.
When the social worker called him on a January night decades later, Peter was thinking about Mr. Masiko in the marketplace.
He said yes.
The hallway
Anthony walked into the house in his blue pajamas. He set down his bag. He looked around at the unfamiliar furniture in the unfamiliar living room of the unfamiliar man who had just told him to call him Mr. Peter.
Peter showed him to a bedroom. He kept his tone even, polite, professional — the way a foster parent learns to keep things, so that a child who is going to leave again in seventy-two hours does not get attached to something he cannot keep.
Anthony had been in the house for about twenty minutes when he looked up at Peter and said something Peter was not prepared for.
According to interviews Peter has given to CNN, the Washington Post, and People magazine, Anthony said something close to this: I was told that when I was eleven, I would get to choose who my dad was. So I am choosing you.
Peter has said publicly that he did not know how to answer. He had not been a father before. He had been a son, briefly, to a stranger in a marketplace. He had been a foster parent to twelve children before Anthony. He had not been anyone’s dad.
He told Anthony they would talk about it.
Inside, he was already deciding.
What had been done to Anthony
The next Monday, when the social worker came to pick Anthony up, Peter signed the temporary paperwork. Then he asked the question he had been trying not to ask all weekend.
Why was he at the hospital?
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